Hirata Atsutane

Biography

Early life

Hirata was born as the fourth son of Ōwada Seihē Toshitane (大和田 清兵衛 祚胤), an Obangashira (low-ranking) samurai of Kubota Domain, in what is now part of the city of Akita in northern Japan. Little is known of his early childhood, but it appears he was impoverished and faced hostility from his step-mother. He left home in 1795, renouncing his ties to his family and to the Domain and traveled to Edo and worked as a laborer and as a servant, while pursuing opportunities to study rangaku, geography, and astronomy. In 1800, at the age of 25, he caught the attention of Hirata Tōbē (平田藤兵衛), a scholar and instructor in the Yamaga school of military strategy, formerly of Bitchū-Matsuyama Domain, who adopted him and from whom he received the family name of Hirata. Around this time, he met his future wife, the daughter of Ishibashi Tsunefusa (石橋常房), a hatamoto of Numazu Domain, whom he married the following year. Evidently the two became romantically involved while Hirata was working as a menial servant in the Ishibashi household. Taking his family name, she was known as Hirata Orise (平田織瀬). Orise died in 1812.

Hirata claimed to be a descendant of Taira no Masakado.

Development of Kokugaku studies

While in Edo, Hirata was a student of the Neo-Confucianism of Yamazaki Ansai (1619–1682); however, his interests were very broad. Concerned by Russian raids and incursions into north Ezo (today's Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands), he studied modern Dutch medicine under the surgeon Yoshida Chōshuku. His studies under Yoshida included at least one human dissection. He later turned towards Daoism as found in the works of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi. He learned about the works of Motoori Norinaga, the founder of the kokugaku movement, in 1803, two years after Motoori's death. Hirata claimed later to have received the mantle of kokugaku teacher in a dream directly from Motoori Norinaga, but the story is apocryphal. Originally, he published under the name of Masuganoya (真菅乃屋), meaning "house of sedge", but during a tour of rural shrines in 1816 he acquired an ancient stone vessel flute which he cherished dearly and changed his publishing name to Ibukinoya, or "house of breath". He became a student of Motoori Haruniwa, and read voraciously the ancient and Chinese classics, foreign works by Nicolaus Copernicus and Isaac Newton and treatises on Buddhism and Shinto. He was also a prolific writer. Representative works in the study of ancient Japanese traditions include Tama no mihashira, Koshi seibun, Kodō taii and Zoku shintō taii, and the commentaries Koshichō and Koshiden. He is also noted for his studies of ancient Indian and Chinese tradition (Indo zōshi and Morokoshi taikoden), and texts dealing with the spirit world, including Senkyō ibun and Katsugorō saisei kibun. His early work Honkyō gaihen indicates an acquaintance with Christian literature that had been authored by Jesuits in China.

Though he is traditionally ranked fourth in the lineage of kokugaku scholars, Hirata actually represents a break with the purely scholarly urban culture characteristic of the revival of classical nativist learning, and represents a trend toward a populist message. Hirata laid particular emphasis on reaching the average man, and adapted his own style to them by employing at times the vernacular idiom. Hirata frequently expressed hostility to the Confucian and Buddhist scholars of the day, advocating instead a revival of the “ancient ways” in which the emperor was to be revered. Hirata's first published work, Kamōsho (1803) was a scathing attack on the works of Confucian philosopher Dazai Shundai (1680–1747) on Buddhism, and resulted in an invitation to teach from the Yoshida family, the hereditary clan leading Yoshida Shinto.

The contents of his 1841 treatise Tenchō mukyūreki, in which he suggested that loyalty to the Emperor ought to take precedence over loyalty to one's lord (i.e. the shogun), angered the ruling Tokugawa government, and he was sentenced to house arrest in Akita until his death in 1843.